How to work fast in software

Working fast is not about writing code faster or trying to complete tasks faster. If you want to work fast, it’s all about prioritisation. If you prioritise the right things, you will end up doing more than if you just try to do things fast.

One definition of being effective is to bring more value in less time.

I really like this definition of the concept “effective”, maybe because I came up with the quote myself…

I’d recommend using a value / time table for all the work that you do. In the example shown below we have some different tasks. The table has the properties “value” which is what value the task brings to users, stakeholders, and developers. Sometimes all three gets effected by a task, sometimes only one of the three. Just use a average of the values if there is more than one group getting effected by the task. Then we have the property “effort” which is how much time we estimate the task to take and then “sum” is value minus effort. The scale is between 1–5 for both “value” and “effort” where 5 is the highest.

The first task is a login bug, let’s say 50% of our users can’t log in so that would give the task high value, the effort is estimated to be 3 which gives us a sum of 2. The same applies for the rest of the tasks.

Now, someone may ask. “How will prioritising these task make us complete them faster if we are gonna do all 4 anyways? Just pick one and start working asap.”

In software development, the demand for features and tasks to be done is almost always higher than what the software team is able to produce. Which I think is a good thing, but let’s not get into that right now. That dynamic of more things to do, than what you can complete, makes prioritisation extremely important.

One could also argue that bringing the highest value as fast as possible by doing the task that has the highest sum is valuable even though you will complete all 4 tasks, like in this example making sure that people can login, before fixing the IE font color.

I recommend using this type of table in all the work that you do, this format is what I like to use, but these tables and point systems can be tweaked as much as you want. You could even do the table in your head and not even write it down.

Prioritise well and move fast!

Thanks for reading.